Myths to Live By

by Joseph Campbell

  Fig. 5.4 — Kṛṣṇa and the Cowherds

  A third way, known as bhakti, devotional yoga, is the closest of the disciplines to what we in the West term “worship,” or “religion.” It consists in giving one’s life wholly in selfless devotion to some beloved being or thing, who becomes thereby in fact one’s “chosen god.” There is a charming story told of the great nineteenth-century Indian saint Ramakrishna. A lady came to him in some distress because she had realized that she did not actually love and truly worship God. “Is there, then, nothing you love?” he asked her; and when she replied that she loved her baby nephew, “There,” said he, “there is your Kṛṣṇa, your Beloved. In your service to him, you are serving God.” And indeed that god Kṛṣṇa himself, as we are told in one of his legends, when he was living as a child among a tribe of simple cowherds, taught and advised those folk to worship, not an abstract god above, unseen, but their own cows. “There is where your devotion is, and where God’s blessing to you resides. Worship your cows.” And they garlanded the cows, and paid them worship. The lesson is clear, and not a little like that of the recent teaching of the modern Christian theologian Paul Tillich, to the point that “God is your highest concern.”

  The fourth, finally, and principal type of yoga expounded in the Bhagavad Gītā is that known as the yoga of action, karma yoga. It is prepared for already by the very setting of the famous piece: the battlefield at the opening of the legendary Great War of the Sons of India, at the close of the Vedic-Aryan chivalrous age, when the whole feudal aristocracy of the land was self-exterminated in a bloodbath of mutual slaughter. At the opening of the portentous scene, the young prince Arjuna, about to engage in the greatest action of his career, bade his charioteer, the young god Kṛṣṇa, his glorious friend, to drive him out between the two assembled battle lines, where he looked to left and right and, recognizing in both armies many relatives and friends, noble comrades and heroes of virtue, he let fall his bow and, overcome with pity and great sorrow, said to the god, his driver, “My limbs fail, my mouth is parched, my hair is standing on end. Better that I myself should die here than that I should initiate this battle. I would not kill, to rule the universe: how much less for the rule of this earth?” To which the young god replied with the following piercing words: “Whence this ignoble cowardice?” And with that the great teaching began:

  To that which is born, death is certain; to that which is dead, birth is certain: be not afflicted by the unavoidable. As a noble whose duty it is to protect the law, refusing to fight this righteous war you will forfeit both virtue and honor. Your proper concern is alone the action of duty, not the fruits of the action. Cast then away all desire and fear for the fruits, and perform your duty.16

  After that stern talk, the god cleared Arjuna’s eyes, and the youth in amazement beheld his friend transfigured—with the radiance of a thousand suns, many flashing eyes and faces, many arms uplifting weapons, many heads, many mouths with glittering tusks. And behold! those two great hosts from either side were pouring, flying into those flaming mouths, crashing on the terrible teeth, perishing; and the monster was licking all its lips. “My God! Who are you?” Arjuna cried, with every hair now standing. And there came from what had been his friend, the Lord of the World, this answer: “I am Black Time, here for the annihilation of these hosts. Even without you, those who are about to die will not live. So now, get in there! Appear to be killing those that I have already slain. Do your duty and be not distressed by any touch of fear.”17

  “Perform your duty,” in India means, “Perform without question the assigned duty of your caste.” Arjuna was a noble: his duty was to fight. We in the West, however, no longer think that way; and that is why the Oriental concept of the infallible spiritual mentor, the guru, is no longer of any real use here. It does not work, and it can’t work. For our notion of the mature individual is not of a person who simply accepts without question or criticism the dictates and current ideals of his social group, as a child would and should accept the orders of a parent. Our ideal is, rather, of one who through his own experience and considered judgment (and I mean experienced judgment, not a parroting of the lectures of some freshman sociology course under old Professor So-and-So with his program for the universe), through his own living, has arrived at some reasoned and reasonable attitudes and will function now not as the obedient servant of some unassailable authority but in terms of his own self-responsible determinations. Duty here, therefore, does not mean at all what it means throughout the Orient. It does not mean accepting like a child what has been authoritatively taught. It means thinking, evaluating, and developing an ego: a faculty, that is to say, of independent observation and rational criticism, capable of interpreting its environment as well as of estimating its own powers in relation to circumstance; and of initiating courses of action, then, that will be relevant not to ideals of the past, but to possibilities of the present. But exactly that is in the East the one forbidden thing.

  Many of my professor friends are beginning to suggest that our students today are looking not for teachers but for gurus. The guru in the Orient accepts responsibility for his student’s moral life, and the student’s aim, reciprocally, must be to identify with the guru and become, if possible, just like him. But as far as I can see—and so I tell my academic cronies—these students of ours lack the first virtue of such a student, Oriental style, which is, namely, faith, śraddhā, “perfect faith,” in the unquestioningly revered guru. Criticism, on the other hand, and self-responsible judgment are what we have traditionally hoped to develop in students, and often enough we have succeeded. In fact, with the present crop we have to such a degree succeeded that, hardly out of diapers, they are ready now to teach teacher, which is a bit too much of a good thing. What they may be learning from the Orient, which so many are striving to emulate, I am not going to try to suggest, beyond noting that it will have to be something—the first step or two at least—of the mystic inward way into themselves; and this, if followed without losing touch with the conditions of contemporary life, might well lead in not a few cases to a new depth and wealth of creative thought and fulfillment in life and in literature and the arts.

  Fig. 5.5 — Joseph Campbell in Japan

  And with that, I come to my third personal anecdote, which is again to be of the confrontation of East and West in religion; but with a suggestion now of the way in which the Orient turns the magic of religion into art. This one is of an event that occurred in the summer of 1958, when I was in Japan for the Ninth International Congress on the History of Religions. One of our leading New York social philosophers, who was a conspicuous delegate to that extraordinarily colorful assemblage—a learned, genial, and charming gentleman, who, however, had had little or no previous experience either of the Orient or of religion (in fact I wondered by what miracle he was there)—having gone along with the rest of us on our visits to a number of noble Shintō shrines and beautiful Buddhist temples, was finally ready to ask a few significant questions. There were many Japanese members of the congress, not a few of them Shintō priests, and on the occasion of a great lawn party in the precincts of a glorious Japanese garden, our friend approached one of these. “You know,” he said, “I’ve been now to a good many ceremonies and have seen quite a number of shrines, but I don’t get the ideology; I don’t get your theology.”

  The Japanese (you may know) do not like to disappoint visitors, and this gentleman, polite, apparently respecting the foreign scholar’s profound question, paused as though in deep thought, and then, biting his lips, slowly shook his head. “I think we don’t have ideology,” he said. “We don’t have theology. We dance.”

  That, for me, was the lesson of the congress. What it told was that in Japan, in the native Shintō religion of the land, where the rites are extremely stately, musical, and imposing, no attempt has been made to reduce their “affect images” to words. They have been left to speak for themselves—as rites, as works of art—through the eyes to the listeni
ng heart. And that, I would say, is what we, in our own religious rites, had best be doing too. Ask an artist what his picture “means,” and you will not soon ask such a question again. Significant images render insights beyond speech, beyond the kinds of meaning speech defines. And if they do not speak to you, that is because you are not ready for them, and words will only serve to make you think you have understood, thus cutting you off altogether. You don’t ask what a dance means, you enjoy it. You don’t ask what the world means, you enjoy it. You don’t ask what you mean, you enjoy yourself; or at least, so you do when you are up to snuff.

  But to enjoy the world requires something more than mere good health and good spirits; for this world, as we all now surely know, is horrendous. “All life,” said the Buddha, “is sorrowful”; and so, indeed, it is. Life consuming life: that is the essence of its being, which is forever a becoming. “The world,” said the Buddha, “is an ever-burning fire.” And so it is. And that is what one has to affirm, with a yea! a dance! a knowing, solemn, stately dance of the mystic bliss beyond pain that is at the heart of every mythic rite.

  And so, to conclude, let me recount now a really marvelous Hindu legend to this point, from the infinitely rich mythology of the god Śiva and his glorious world-goddess Parvati. The occasion was of a time when there came before this great divinity an audacious demon who had just overthrown the ruling gods of the world and now came to confront the highest of all with a non-negotiable demand, namely, that the god should hand over his goddess to the demon. Well, what Śiva did in reply was simply to open that mystic third eye in the middle of his forehead, and paff! a lightning bolt hit the earth, and there was suddenly there a second demon, even larger than the first. He was a great lean thing with a lionlike head, hair waving to the quarters of the world, and his nature was sheer hunger. He had been brought into being to eat up the first, and was clearly fit to do so. The first thought: “So what do I do now?” and with a very fortunate decision threw himself upon Śiva’s mercy.

  Now it is a well-known theological rule that when you throw yourself on a god’s mercy the god cannot refuse to protect you; and so Śiva had now to guard and protect the first demon from the second. Which left the second, however, without meat to quell his hunger and in anguish he asked Śiva, “Whom, then, do I eat?” to which the god replied, “Well, let’s see: why not eat yourself?”

  Fig. 5.6 — Kīrtimukha

  And with that, no sooner said than begun. Commencing with his feet, teeth chopping away, that grim phenomenon came right on up the line, through his own belly, on up through his chest and neck, until all that remained was a face. And the god, thereupon, was enchanted. For here at last was a perfect image of the monstrous thing that is life, which lives on itself. And to that sunlike mask, which was now all that was left of that lionlike vision of hunger, Śiva said, exulting, “I shall call you ‘Face of Glory,’ Kīrtimukha, and you shall shine above the doors to all my temples. No one who refuses to honor and worship you will come ever to knowledge of me.”18

  The obvious lesson of all of which is that the first step to the knowledge of the highest divine symbol of the wonder and mystery of life is in the recognition of the monstrous nature of life and its glory in that character: the realization that this is just how it is and that it cannot and will not be changed. Those who think—and their name is legion—that they know how the universe could have been better than it is, how it would have been had they created it, without pain, without sorrow, without time, without life, are unfit for illumination. Or those who think—as do many—“Let me first correct society, then get around to myself” are barred from even the outer gate of the mansion of God’s peace. All societies are evil, sorrowful, inequitable; and so they will always be. So if you really want to help this world, what you will have to teach is how to live in it. And that no one can do who has not himself learned how to live in it in the joyful sorrow and sorrowful joy of the knowledge of life as it is. That is the meaning of the monstrous Kīrtimukha, “Face of Glory,” over the entrances to the sanctuaries of the god of yoga, whose bride is the goddess of life. No one can know this god and goddess who will not bow to that mask in reverence and pass humbly through.

  [Discuss]

  VI—The Inspiration of Oriental Art

  Fig. 6.1 — The Perfection of Wisdom

  VI

  The Inspiration of Oriental Art

  [1968]1

  In Indian textbooks of aesthetics four types of subject are recognized as appropriate for artistic treatment. They are, first, abstract qualities, such as goodness, truth, beauty, and the like; next, types of action and mood (the slaying of enemies or of monsters, the winning of a lover, moods of melancholy, bliss, and so on); third, human types (Brahmins, mendicants, holy or wicked princes, merchants, servants, lovers, outcasts, criminals, etc.); and finally, deities—all of which, we note, are abstract. For there is in the Orient no interest in the individual as such, or in unique, unprecedented facts or events. Accordingly, what the glorious spectacle of Oriental art mainly offers are repetitions, over and over, of certain tried and true themes and motifs. And when these are compared with the galaxies of Renaissance and post-Renaissance Europe, what is perhaps most striking is the absence in the Oriental traditions of anything like significant portraiture. Consider the works of Rembrandt or Titian: the attention given in these to the representation of what we call character, personality, the uniqueness, at once physical and spiritual, of an individual presence. Such a concern for what is not enduring is utterly contrary to the informing spirit of Oriental art. Our respect for the individual as a unique phenomenon, not to be suppressed in his idiosyncrasies, but to be cultivated and brought to fulfillment as a gift to the world such as never before was seen on earth, nor will ever appear again, is contrary, toto caelo, to the spirit not only of Oriental art but also of Oriental life. And in keeping with this turn of mind, the individual is expected not to innovate or invent, but to perfect himself in the knowledge and rendition of norms.

  Accordingly, the Oriental artist must not only address himself to standard themes, but also have no interest in any such thing as we understand by self-expression. Accounts, such as abound in the biographies of Western masters, of an artist’s solitary agony in long quest of his own special language to bring forward his personal message, we shall search for long and in vain in the annals of Oriental art. Such ego-oriented thinking is alien completely to Eastern life, thought, and religiosity, which are concerned, on the contrary, precisely with the quenching of ego and of all interest in this evanescent thing that is merely the “I” of a passing dream.

  On the negative side, this cultivation of anonymity has led to the production of a panorama ad infinitum of academic stereotypes—which, however, is not on the side of our subject to which I wish to address myself. My theme is to be rather of those orders and master-works of consummate art that do indeed render to mortal eyes the knowledge of an immortal presence in all things. The song that one hears in one’s ears-of-thought when reading the Bhagavad Gītā , of that spirit immortal that never was born, never dies, but lives in all things that are born to die as the actual being of their apparent being and whose radiance gives to them their glory, is the universal song that is sung not in Indian art alone but in Far Eastern life as well; and it is to this that I would attune my present song.

  To begin with, then (commencing in India and moving later on to the Far East), Indian art is a yoga and its master a kind of yogi. Having performed through years the assignments of an obedient apprenticeship, and having gained at last recognition as a master, commissioned to erect, say, a temple or to fashion a sacred image, the artist first will meditate, to bring before his inner eye a vision of the symbolic building to be planned, or of the deity to be rendered. Indeed, there are legends even of entire cities envisioned in this way: of some saintly monarch who will have had a dream in which he will have seen, as in a revelation, the whole form of the temple or city to be built. And I wonder if that may not b
e the reason why, in certain Oriental cities one can feel, even today, that one is moving in a dream: the city is dreamlike because in its inception it was actually suggested by a dream, which then was rerendered in stone.

  Fig. 6.2 — Cities of Dream

  The artist craftsman about to set to work fashioning the image of a divinity—let us say, of Viṣṇu—will first have studied all the relevant texts, to fix in mind the canonical signs, postures, proportions, etc., of the aspect of the god to be rendered. He will then settle down, pronouncing in his heart the seed syllable of the deity’s name, and if he is fortunate there will appear, in due time, a vision before his inner eye of the very form he is to render, which will be the model, then, for his work of art. Thus the greatest works of the great periods of India were actually revelations; and to appreciate them properly as the revelations not of supposed supernatural beings, but of a power of nature latent in ourselves and requiring only to be recognized to be brought to fulfillment in our lives, we need only turn to that extraordinary psychological textbook, A Description of the Six Bodily Centers of the Unfolding Serpent Power (Ṣaṭ-cakra-nirūpana), which has been available now since 1919 in the superb translation of Sir John Woodroffe.2

  The basic thesis of the so-called kuṇḍalinī yoga system elucidated in this fundamental work is that there are six plus one—i.e., seven—psychological centers distributed up the body, from its base to the crown of the head, which can, through yoga, be successively activated and so caused to release ever higher realizations of spiritual consciousness and bliss. These are known as “lotuses,” padmas, or as cakra s, “wheels,” and are to be thought of as normally hanging limp. However, when touched and activated by a rising spiritual power called the kuṇḍalinī, which can be made to ascend through a mystic channel up the middle of the spine, they awaken to life and shine. The name of this power, kuṇḍalinī , “the coiled one,” is a feminine Sanskrit noun, here referring to the idea of a coiled serpent, to be thought of as sleeping in the lowest of the seven body centers. In the mythologies of the Orient serpents generally symbolize the vital power that sloughs death, as serpents shed their skin to be (as it were) reborn. This power is thought of in India as feminine... the feminine, form-building, life-giving and -supporting force by which the universe and all its beings are rendered animate. Sleeping coiled in the lowest of the seven centers of the body, it leaves the other six unactivated. The aim, therefore, of this yoga is to wake the serpent, cause her to lift her head, and to bring her up the mystic interior channel of the spine known as susumnā, “rich in pleasure,” piercing at each stage of her thrilling ascent the lotus there located. The yogi, sitting cross-legged, erect, holding in mind certain thoughts and pronouncing mystic syllables, will be first concerned to regulate the rhythm of his breathing, inhaling deeply, holding, and exhaling to fix counts: in through the right nostril, out through the left, etc., pervading thus the entire body with prāṇa, “ spiritus,” “breath,” the breath of life, until presently the coiled serpent stirs and the process begins.